Syncing a PDA with a web hosted database

McGintyMcGoo

Greetings

I have been asked to look at a project that has a website talking to a hosted database. Part of the project is to have the same database (or a scaled down version) running on a PDA (initially a Palm Pilot).

As I have no experience whatsoever on PDAs...
What options are available to ensure that the Palm database is syncronised with the online database? Would a user need to download data updates through their PC onto the Palm or can they bypass the PC altogether? As the Palm content is all text with links, would I better off download HTML pages to the Palm? Are they any Palm databases that you can recommend?

So many questions, so little time.
Any suggestions would really be appreciated.

Cheers

McGintyMcGoo

After some research, I can start to answer some of these questions myself.
(Just to prove that I'm not sitting back waiting for someone to do my work for me)

What options are available to ensure that the Palm database is syncronised with the online database?

This will be done by docking/hot syncing the Palm with a PC. The PC will have a database on it that can be updated from the online database.

Would a user need to download data updates through their PC onto the Palm or can they bypass the PC altogether?

Answered above.

As the Palm content is all text with links, would I better off download HTML pages to the Palm?

Still not sure what to do here. I have checked out www.palmsource.com for some information. I have also downloaded the Palm SDK but it's IDE allows to write in C/C++ (not my strongest languages). If anyone has any other suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Are they any Palm databases that you can recommend?

I have seen some databases here but I not sure if I need to go down the database road. If downloading only HTML pages to a Palm, I could do all of my database/HTML generation work on the PC that the Palm will sync to.

Anyone have any knowledge of channel development, like this . Could this be applied in my situation?

The Corinthian

There are a number of considerations to take into account. Firstly the connection to the remote data source. Hot syncing is one solution, however it requires that you place a ‘proxy application’ on the PC you’re syncing with (which in turn would connect to the remote data source over HTTP). Connecting directly is a second, and simpler, option - where your PDA will use a mobile to dial up to an ISP, over IR or Bluetooth, and connect accordingly to the remote data source over HTTP.

Secondly you should consider how ‘fat’ a client you want to build. A very ‘thin’ client would be useless (you’d have to connect to your remote data source every time you want to do a search of your data) and a very ‘fat’ one would simply not fit on a PDA. So you have to find the right balance between the two allowing you to grab a usable snapshot of the data for offline use on the PDA.

As for platform, you may want to look at Codewarrior (for C++ development of your client) or alternatively turn to Java with either the J2ME or Waba platforms.